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Marvin Minsky is often regarded as the father of modern AI, but when Miles visited him in 2010, Minsky wasn’t a proud father. In fact, Minsky was disappointed with … LISTEN NOW »

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How did our early solar system form? What are the origins of life? How likely are we to get hit by a dangerous asteroid? A daring NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx hopes … LISTEN NOW »

Jupiter has many moons, but none are quite like Europa: it has a thick crust of ice and a huge amount of liquid saltwater underneath its surface. In fact, many believe it’s the best place in the Solar System that we … LISTEN NOW »

Hurricane Florence was a perfect example of how climate change supercharges extreme weather events. But climate change also affects us in other more subtle, interconnected, and difficult to manage ways. Thankfully, … LISTEN NOW »

Steve Squyres is the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Program, which gave us the plucky and productive rovers Spirit and Opportunity. With the latter on life support and the former no longer with us, … LISTEN NOW »

There are calls in the EPA and in Congress for the use of more transparent science. But what does that mean? Why do scientists seem united against these regulations? And what would it mean if they went into effect? In … LISTEN NOW »

For more than three decades, behavioral biologist Denise Herzing has tracked and observed a pod of wild spotted dolphins that live in the warm clear waters of the Bahamas. She’s learned an awful lot about their behaviors … LISTEN NOW »

Methane is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of gas: on one hand, it is the cleanest-burning fossil fuel. On the other, if it leaks, methane itself is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In this special … LISTEN NOW »

For several years, environmental advocacy groups have been fighting to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos from agricultural use. A turnover in leadership at the EPA has led to a moment of indecision on what to do about the … LISTEN NOW »

After years of exhaustive research linking the pesticide chlorpyrifos to a host of developmental and cognitive deficiencies in children, the EPA was poised to ban the chemical in November 2016. But something else … LISTEN NOW »

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not off in the distant future... in some ways it is already here. How is AI already changing our lives? Does it work independently of us or does it also have our all-too-human biases? … LISTEN NOW »

Communicating the science of climate change, with its overwhelming expert consensus, seems like it should be easy. However, a science-averse media and strong fossil fuel lobby make it exceedingly difficult. Climatologist … LISTEN NOW »

What is machine learning? How does it work? What are these artificially intelligent algorithms useful for? Considering they are used by Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook and many other companies we interact with on a … LISTEN NOW »

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Methane is a much more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is more short lived than CO2 (about a decade as opposed to a century) but it is 85 times more effective at warming. Rob Green is a world … LISTEN NOW »

In the final episode in our series on Junk News, some wisdom from one of the leading experts in the murky world of online misinformation. He also happens to be the producer of the series that we aired on the PBS … LISTEN NOW »

Facebook was created for people to share family photos and memories. But as ads entered the mix, the platform was refined to hold our attention for as long as possible. Quality was not a consideration - until recently. … LISTEN NOW »

The Internet was supposed to provide a utopian virtual world where all of us could come together in peace, love and harmony to better understand each other and our differing viewpoints...
But we got derailed on the … LISTEN NOW »

As Hawaii trembles with earthquakes and the Kilauea volcano continues to spew forth lava and gas, residents and the wider world watch and wonder: how long will this renewed activity continue? To find out, we turn to Mike … LISTEN NOW »

Russian actors may have run an online disinformation campaign during the 2016 US presidential elections, but they likely learned their tactics from Americans. As part of our investigation, PBS NewsHour series producer … LISTEN NOW »

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Russian actors may have run an organized online disinformation campaign during the 2016 US presidential elections, but they likely learned their clickbait tactics from Americans. In our ongoing investigation of junk … LISTEN NOW »

Top US intelligence agencies agree that Russia meddled in the 2016 US Presidential election using an organized campaign of online trolling and misinformation. The details of exactly how are harder to uncover. Jonathan … LISTEN NOW »

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has placed Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook at the center of the data privacy debate. But is Facebook’s ad-driven business model fundamentally incompatible with protecting users’ personal … LISTEN NOW »

The uncontained engine failure of Southwest flight 1380 reminds us once again that commercial aviation is a business that does not always put safety first - and regulators seem reluctant to change that. Jennifer … LISTEN NOW »

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Long before Facebook, Twitter or even Google existed, the fact checking website Snopes.com was running down the half-truths, misinformation, and outright lies that ricochet across the Internet.
Today it remains … LISTEN NOW »

How did the internet become a tangled web of misinformation? Miles speaks to danah boyd, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, founder of Data & Society, and Visiting Professor at New York University. boyd … LISTEN NOW »

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Who or what determines what's in your Facebook News Feed? It's a complex algorithm that aims to put what interests you most at the top of the queue. Increasingly, Facebook is focused on trying to determine what … LISTEN NOW »

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In this episode of Miles To Go, Miles catches up with astronaut Scott Kelly and learns about what it’s like to spend a year in space. Kelly talks about the physical and emotional toll of his historic mission, the … LISTEN NOW »

When you think of 3D printing, you may envision useless trinkets, a cheesy iPhone cover, or extruded cheese doodles. But that would be so 2014 of you!
In this episode of Miles To Go, Miles sits down with John Hart, an … LISTEN NOW »

Siegfried Hecker is a Metallurgist and Nuclear Scientist. He served as the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986-1997 and is a professor at The Center For International Cooperation at Stanford … LISTEN NOW »

Eugene Tseng describes himself as the most “overeducated garbage man” in the world. An environmental engineer and lawyer who teaches at UCLA and Cal State Northridge, he has spent decades understanding what we throw away … LISTEN NOW »

In July of 2017, an Air Canada passenger jet loaded with 135 passengers and 5 crewmembers nearly landed on a taxiway at San Francisco International Airport, where four jets were waiting to take off.
At the last … LISTEN NOW »